I Maestri del Paesaggio

Catellani & Smith and Architettura Sonora for the I Maestri del Paesaggio event
Yuval Avital’s sounds make contact with the light in a thrilling journey through nature and human life

 

On its fifth year, the I Maestri del Paesaggio – Masters of the Landscape – event devoted to landscape architecture, green areas and the landscape has transformed Bergamo’s upper town into a haven of culture and debate.
This festival organised by Arketipos and Bergamo town council has also set up ‘Landscape Rooms: a Sound and Light Garden’, a ‘painterly’ project designed by Catellani & Smith and Architettura Sonora with the participation of multidisciplinary Israeli artist Yuval Avital who has composed an exclusively created, powerfully artistic electronic work for the occasion.
The historic location of the Casa Tresoldi location, a mini green gem overlooking Via Colleoni which links Piazza Vecchia and Piazza Mascheroni is thus the site of a sensory installation fluctuating vibrantly between design, art and technology. An introspective journey through the intimate, secluded green of the garden as it ‘reawakes’ when the sun sets shows us all the mysterious power of light and sound to shape and model the landscape and space in general.
Hidden amongst the leaves and camouflaged in the woods in the heart of a small peat area or at the foot of century old trees, light and sound sources blend discreetly into the environment as if they had emerged from its very midst.
A light tree in particular, a reinterpretation of a product which Enzo Catellani designed in 2005 is beyond the passage of time and enchants with precious ‘light fruits’ in glass in contrast with a naturally aged copper green structure.
Architettura Sonora’s modules – modelled into mini sculptures – have been set up alongside Enzo Catellani’s creations diffusing Yuval Avital’s electronic work and contributing to the creation of a very special atmosphere.
A few ‘objects’, lastly, conceal sophisticated diffusion systems in their structures creating light and sound quality at the same time.
What emerges is an antique and magical garden, a movingly delicate and fragile journey in a quasi-Japanese environment in terms of the harmony between ‘human and natural presence’. It is a magical example of equilibrium and, above all, of the way in which nature, light and sound are not simply compatible but also capable of reinforcing each other making our perception of the landscape more moving and changeable. This is a theme which is brought to life by the journey marked out this year by I Maestri del Paesaggio focusing on the ‘Feeding Landscape’ as a forerunner, too, for next year’s ‘Wild Landscape’ theme.

Medousê, the ‘sound lamp’

Making its appearance for the first time in the context of the light and sound creations which populate Giardino Tresoldi, Medousê is a new innovative sound concept born of the encounter between Enzo Catellani and Architettura Sonora.
From the ancient Greek word for ‘protect’ Medousê is a module which presents itself as protector and guardian of the natural world from which it draws inspiration in the spontaneity of its light and the gloss of its faceted glass shell.
Medousê allows for homogeneous and uniform 360° light diffusion and a powerful and entirely natural sound pattern which makes its very difficult to identify the source of the sound.

 

‘Fields’, Yuval Avital’s electronci work
Israeli musician, composer and guitar player Yuval Avital, is returning to Bergamo three years after his first visit with a surprising sound installation, an echo which reverberates over Piazza Vecchia, the fulcrum of I Maestri del Paesaggio and Giardino di Casa Tresoldi for a Light and Sound Garden.
The theme of his 65 minute long score called ‘Fields’ is the relationship between ‘environment’ and ‘artifice’ with sounds from nature combined with polyphonic choirs halfway between boy sopranos and grainy sounds.
In ‘Fields’ real becomes digital, cultivated fields are transmuted into recordings, birdsong into electronic reproduction, the ‘voices’ of the trees into decomposed whisperings.
The music in the two locations also lends itself to entirely different but complementary interpretations which interweave in Piazza Vecchia with the sounds of the town and the more powerful, all-encompassing and overwhelming ones in the Sound and Light Garden in which we are invited to take part in a more intimate and entirely personal search for inner light.